In a previous post I talked about setting up an encrypted file based keyring store for Mercurial. With some recent updates of the Python keyring modules, the setup changed a little bit again.

The file-backed keyrings got moved out to the keyrings.alt package. $HOME/.local/share/python_keyring/keyringrc.cfg needs to be adjusted as follows:

[backend]
default-keyring=keyrings.alt.file.EncryptedKeyring

In an earlier post I documented how to set up an encrypted file store for your keyring. With recent versions of Python keyring (at least 3 and up) the CryptedFileKeyring backend got removed and replaced by EncryptedKeyring. So in your $HOME/.local/share/python_keyring/keyringrc.cfg you need to now have the following:

[backend]
default-keyring=keyring.backends.file.EncryptedKeyring

Mercurial allows for tying in keyring configuration for those of us who do not want to store passwords in plain-text in our .hgrc files or constantly using SSH.

First install the Python keyring library by running pip install keyring. After that is installed, checkout Mercurial keyring repository and add to $HOME/.hgrc the following:

[extensions]
mercurial_keyring = ~/path/to/mercurial_keyring/mercurial_keyring.py

Next up, configure your repositories, e.g. in the case of Bitbucket I use:

[auth]
bitbucket.prefix = bitbucket.org/asmodai
bitbucket.username = asmodai
bitbucket.schemes = https

Mercurial keyring will automatically decide on the best keyring to use. On a FreeBSD system with no Gnome or other systems providing a keyring, if you do not specify a specific keyring, the system will use the file ~/.local/share/python_keyring/keyring_pass.cfg. This keyring file stores the passwords encoded in Base64 in plain-text. This is not quite what you would want from a security point of view. You can configure which backend store to use by editing $HOME/.local/share/python-keyring/keyringrc.cfg. To get a plain-text file with encrypted keys use the following configuration:

[backend]
default-keyring=keyring.backend.CryptedFileKeyring

This will create the file ~/.local/share/python-keyring/crypted_pass.cfg after initializing the backend store with a password. Look at the documentation for keyring on what other configuration options are available.

Note: make sure the PyCrypto dependency is installed with the _fastmath module. This in turn depends on the gmp library.

Having resolved recent SSL certificate issues with Mercurial/TortoiseHG, I now encountered a similar issue with the wildcard certificate for *.google.com where getting a clone would result in a "SSL: Server certificate verify failed" error.

One way around this issue is to add the fingerprint for this certificate to your configuration. Currently for *.google.com this is 00:d5:88:35:29:b9:7f:03:92:60:c2:04:e4:b7:01:f0:07:53:15:a8 and one way to get this from a Unix command line is with openssl s_client -connect code.google.com:443 < /dev/null 2> /dev/null | openssl x509 -in cert-code -fingerprint -noout -in /dev/stdin | tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]". This corresponds with Chrome's certificate view's thumbprint field, you just need to add colons.

Right click in Explorer, select TortoiseHG » Global Settings and then click Edit File and add the following:

[hostfingerprints]
code.google.com = 00:d5:88:35:29:b9:7f:03:92:60:c2:04:e4:b7:01:f0:07:53:15:a8

This should make Mercurial/TortoiseHG work, at least until the certificate expires and you need to update it with the latest fingerprint.

For my own development I use Mercurial and TortoiseHG for my version control system. I also use, at the moment, a CAcert certificate to use HTTPS with my repositories. I am not sure what changed when, but apparently the certificates now get verified. So this causes obvious problems trying to push or pull due to "SSL: Server certificate verify failed" errors.

To make this work on a Windows 7 machine with TortoiseHG in stalled, first download the CAcert root PEM certificate and place it some permanent directory. Next open the TortoiseHG global settings (right click somewhere in Explorer and select TortoiseHG » Global Settings). In the window that opens click the Edit File button. If it does not exist yet create a section similar to this:

[web]
cacerts = C:\path\to\cacert-root.pem

Press Save and OK and any push and pull action with HTTPS URLs should work as they ought to.

So with recent Mercurial 1.7 releases HTTPS support was tightened, so you are bound to encounter a warning in the form of: warning: bitbucket.org certificate not verified (check web.cacerts config setting).

Now, http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/CACertificates there are details on what to configure for certain operating systems. Given I use FreeBSD, I altered my $HOME/.hgrc as follows:

[web]
cacerts = /etc/ssl/cert.pem

For OpenBSD this should be in the same place since release 3.8. But apparently NetBSD does not have such a file in base.

OpenSSH has a fantastic feature called ControlMaster. Basically this option allows you to create a socket that will share your already opened ssh session to the same host. To enable this option for all you put the following snippet in your $HOME/.ssh/config after creating something like $HOME/.ssh/sockets:

Host *
  ControlMaster auto
  ControlPath ~/.ssh/sockets/%r@%h:%p

For every username@host:port it will create a socket in $HOME/.ssh/sockets. The only problem is that current Subversion (1.4.6 on my FreeBSD box) cannot work well with control sockets when using the svn+ssh:// URI identifier. In order to work around this problem you can add a specific host before the wildcard entry, for example:

Host svn.example.com
  ControlMaster no

Host *
  ControlMaster auto
  ControlPath ~/.ssh/sockets/%r@%h:%p

Of course, doing it like this is a bit tedious for every Subversion repository you use in this manner. Thankfully there is another way to do this. In $HOME/.subversion/config there is a section called [tunnels]. If you add the following entry to that section it will disable the ControlMaster:

[tunnels]
ssh = ssh -o ControlMaster=no